We've alluded to it before, and even in this article we'll not adequately reveal the depths to which some in the Election Integrity community have plumbed, but the Pro-HR811 folks are in full-court PR press mode of late in order to see Rush Holt's Election Reform bill passed in the U.S. House. By hook or by crook.
Despite claims passed on by supporters that the bill would come up for a full House vote in the past week or two, no such vote came to pass, although one could be scheduled at any time now that the bill has left committee. Inquiries seeking information on an official date for such a floor vote, sent by The BRAD BLOG to Holt's once-responsive legislative aide working on the legislation, have not been answered.
We too would like to see some version of the bill passed. But as it currently stands there are too many enormous flaws in the bill to earn our support, as we've discussed on these pages in great detail. (Here's one recent example.) As we've described, one of our greatest concerns is the bill's institutionalization of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) touch-screen voting machines for use in American democracy. Such systems, even with the so-called "Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trails" (VVPATs) mandated by the bill --- and perhaps especially with such a mandate --- are antithetical to democracy, as they allow no way for voters to ever verify their invisible electronic ballots as accurate before or after the votes are cast and counted. The VVPATs themselves, as mandated by Holt, are also another problem which may make elections easier to steal, rather than harder. But we'll go into more detail on that at a later date.
There are a host of other reasons why DREs should never be used. Most supporters of Holt's bill --- except for People for the American Way (PFAW), which actually prefers such machines to paper-based systems --- recognize that. Nonethless, they've allowed PFAW and Holt's office to snow them into believing that a DRE ban could not pass in a Democratic Congress, while apparently the Republican dominated House and Senate in Florida, of all places, were able to ban such machines once and for all. Go figure.
As we described recently, it seems that none of the folks who've bought into the "DRE ban can't pass Congress" line seem to have bothered to ask for any evidence of the premise before passing it on to others. Or if they have, they've yet to share the evidence with the public, so that we might lobby those Congress Members who currently support the Holt bill, but would vote against it if it included a ban on DREs, so that the public might either educate them or otherwise discover and expose their reasons for supporting such dangerous machines in our democracy.
Anyway, the propaganda campaign from the pro-Holters is in full swing right now both behind and in front of the scenes as they place editorials and work the back-channel email lists. In the process --- and with the at least passive approval of Holt's office --- they seem hell-bent on destroying the character of any and all who they perceive as being in their way. Yours truly is no exception, of course, as we've been ruthlessly savaged by many of the "loudest" folks who want to see Holt passed --- even if they need to make stuff up about it and/or otherwise mislead Americans and Congress Members about what the bill actually does and doesn't do.
By way of example, see the email posted in full below, as written by NCVoter.net's Joyce McCloy, an ardent pro-Holter and forwarded by another, Kathy Dopp of UtahCountVotes.org. It was posted and then circulated to several large Election Integrity email lists. We can't help but highlight one of the grafs which refers to us directly, if only for the irony --- sure to be lost on the authors --- of our highlighting the charge here in the first place...